Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Friends, dey watching.”

“And if it works?”

“Yo’ still jiving tomorrow.”

Ade O’Donal nodded slowly, as low as he’d ever been. But the Stoney needed him. If he did the burn there was a chance. Small, though, fucking small. Brune drowning in blood.

There were only two terminals on line, that psychic hardline bastard had screwed the Hitachi and the Akai, the super cancer from the gate had crashed the Burrows; that just left the Event Horizon and the Honeywell. And no way was he going to use the Event Horizon terminal, that name was too much bad karma right now.

Ade O’Donal tapped the Honeywell’s power stud, slipping its throat mike round his neck; muttering, typing, eyes locked into the cube. A melt virus got him into Event Horizon’s datanet, disguised as a civil engineering contractor’s bid for a new flatscreen factory at Stafford. He loaded a memox Wolf had given him for the blitz, studying company procedure. Bids would be processed by the finance division, the lowest three forwarded to the freaky Turing core for a final decision.

He pulled a memox from the shelves, one he’d planned on taking with him. “This is like the best I’ve ever written, you know,” he said, a sudden urge to explain, to let the Stoney know he was dealing with a real pro hotrod. “It scrambles databus management programs. That’s the beauty of it, man; once it’s in, you can’t access the system to flush it out. Total internal communication shutdown. The core will be sliced right out of the datanet, along with anything it’s interfaced with.”

“Dat sound sweet.”

“OK.” Ade O’Donal pushed the memox into the Honeywell’s slot, hands quivering.

The cube showed the bid’s data package wrapping around the virus, geometric tentacles choking a crystalline egg. Ade O’Donal probed the finished Trojan with tracer programs. There was no chink in the covering, nothing that hinted at the black treasure beneath the surface. Smooth. And he had made the quotes for the factory ridiculously low, the bid package would be shunted to the core, no sweat.

Idiotically, pride overrode his depression. This was it, his construct, all his own, a solo hotrod burn. Tentimes had made solo.

O’Donal fed the Trojan an activation code keyed to the core’s dump order. It would pass clean through the finance division processors, then once they forwarded it to the core the fucker would detonate, digital H-bomb. Wipe-out time.

Index finger tapped: download.

“Might take a while,” O’Donal said.

“No Matter.”

The diamond-tipped blade clicked softly.

Julia had insisted on relieving the nurse at Katerina’s bedside in the afternoon, keeping a solitary vigil over her brain-wasted friend. She hated every second of it, knowing she deserved it. Pushing Kats towards Kendric had seemed so clever at the time, an elegant solution. Everybody would wind up with what they wanted, no tears, no heartache.

Greg was right, she’d only thought of the deed, never the consequences. Too shallow and self-obsessed. Still a child. Idiot savant.

Katerina stirred, turning, her sleep troubled. Dr Taylor had given her a trauma suppressor. Short-term amnesiac, the woman had explained, it’ll kill the craving for now; but she’d made sure Katerina was infused with tranquillizers throughout the day, only leaving a few periods of brief semi-lucidity for eating and going to the toilet.

Julia had been the one spooning soup into her. Katerina had swallowed automatically, incapable of coherent speech. Compounding the anguish.

Julia had got three of Event Horizon’s premier-grade executives working flat out on securing Katerina that Caribbean treatment, trying to buy a place in the detox clinic. They’d been told there was an eight-month waiting list. Julia refused to let that bother her, pulling in the company’s favours, bullying the clinic with financial and political pressure. Dr Taylor had warned her that Katerina’s cranial blood vessels were saturated with the symbiont; if its grip was ever going to be broken then it would have to be done swiftly.

She’d buy that bloody Caribbean island if necessary. Anything. Anything at all. She just wanted Kats back to her old self. Frivolous, vaguely annoying, and utterly carefree.

The sun had nearly dropped below the horizon, fluorescing a cloud-slashed western sky to a royal gold, fading to black at its zenith. Julia watched it from the bedroom window, seeing the shadows pool in hollows and nooks across Wilholm’s grounds, spilling out over the grass. The fountain in the lily pond died down spluttering, its light sensors switching off the pump.

Julia activated a single wall-mounted biolum, then crossed the room and drew the heavy Tudor curtains across both windows. When she’d first left America and the desert she’d been entranced by dawn and dusk in Europe, cool blues and greens gleaming dully under fiery skies, always different. It’d been magical, the expected sadness that she’d miss the desert’s beauty never materializing.

Tonight the sight left her totally unmoved. Her emotions seemed to have shut down. The climax would come tonight, she was sure of it. The game had ceased to be a game. And she was responsible, she and Grandpa. Kendric’s manoeuvrings and power ploys had been thwarted at every stage. She’d stalemated him all across the board. There was nothing left to him now but the physical. Kendric would have no qualms about that.

Strangely, even Greg had warned her about the danger. Greg the liar. Greg the betrayer. His name was the only one capable of piercing the wrap of numbness around her feelings. She’d believed in him like nobody before. Worshipped from afar, flirted. Opened her soul to him. Confessed the darkest, most shameful secret.

And he’d lied to her.

Just like all the rest. Men must look on her as some kind of victim waiting to be abused. Except for Adrian, a bleak inner voice said, Adrian adored her female side. He was immune to her money. So far. But knowing her luck…

She still couldn’t believe she’d been so mistaken about Greg. He’d said she was beautiful. And she couldn’t be fooled by smooth talk any more, not after Kendric.

Then why? Why the lie?

Access BlitzCulmination. So called because it brought all aspects of the case together. The homogenized data packages unfolded within her glacial mind, rotating the bedroom and Katerina one hundred and eighty degrees from her cognizance. Her processor nodes marshalled it into precise channels once more, a construct that incorporated hard facts, assumptions, suspicions.

She ran the logic matrix once more, the fifth time today. It produced a single diamond-hard conviction. No matter how many times she ran it, how much slackness and wishful thinking she incorporated into the matrix channels, the answer was always the same.

Liar. Traitor. Thief. Heartbreaker.

Cancel BlitzCulmination. One thing it never told her was why Greg would do such a thing. She didn’t understand human nature well enough to guess. And now she’d probably never know.

Katerina had sunk into an innocent dreamless sleep. Julia pulled the frilly snowdrop-pattern duvet up around her shoulders.

Open Channel to NN Core. Load OtherEyes Limiter #Five.

She felt her grandfather snuggle into her mind, welcoming his touch. The last person on the whole planet she still trusted. And what a sad comment on her life that was.

How are we doing? she asked.

Greg hasn’t moved for three hours now. I think Wisbech must be their nesting ground. Clever that. So close, yet so far away. I’m not sure how they got across the Fens basin; too slow for a tilt-fan, possibly a hovercraft.

I trusted him, Grandpa. Really trusted him. Everything he did and said was always right. He made me believe in him. I thought I was safe.